Compiling GeneWeb requires the installation of OCaml and Camlp5. Nowadays, the simplest method is to install them through OPAM (OCaml preferred package manager) that is able to manage multiple versions of OCaml on the same machine. Note that Camlp5 must be installed for each version of the compiler.

Without OPAM, the old way of doing this was to install/compile OCaml and Camlp5 all by yourself.

Don’t forget that if your base has been built under an old version, it won't be compatible with bases built with new version: one should recover through the .gw format to migrate from one to the other.

For GeneWeb 7

Under Linux

Debian Stretch (needs to be updated!)

This has been tested on a Debian in March 2018 (debian-9.3.0-i386-netinst.iso).

Once homebrew is installed you can easily install Opam in Terminal application with these commands:

brew install opam
opam init
opam update
opam switch 4.05

and then OCaml:

opam install -y camlp5 ocamlfind
eval `opam config env`

Before compiling GeneWeb you need to update Bash with Homebrew in a Terminal window:

brew install bash

Do not take into account the caveats about Bash path. You can now download and compile GeneWeb.

Under Windows using Cygwin

This has been tested on Windows 7 x64 and x86 in February 2018.

If you have Windows Powershell (embedded in Windows since XP SP2), this batch script will download/compile/install Cygwin/Opam/OCaml/Camlp5/Ocamfind/GeneWeb for you. You can download the script copying this line on a Windows prompt (command line) with administrator rights:

Then just launch the downloaded script typing opamwin in the same console to install everything.

Without Powershell, you have to download the batch file opamwin.bat and the right Cygwin setup x64 or x86 manually. Launch the script under a prompt with administrator rights and having Cygwin setup in the same directory.

For example, if you want debug symbols/warnings use ./configure -d -we then you can launch gwd adding OCAMLRUNPARAM=b to trigger the printing of a stack backtrace when an uncaught exception aborts the program.

Build GeneWeb gui

Since version 6.xx, an user friendly GTK gui helps managing gwd and gwsetup, it can be build with lablgtk installed.